In this post-contemporary era – still unbaptized by historians – domesticity is one of the guiding principles of our livesat least in developed societies. The pandemic has also given a formidable boost to this tendency to lock ourselves within the four walls of the home. Teleworking, purchases of basic and not so basic goods (from Glovo to Amazon), cultural consumption (with HBO as the anchor flag), online teaching (from college to postgraduate), political activism on the internet (the young Spanish party Can is organized and mobilized largely via Telegram or virtual spaces).
Added to this are other novelties of our time: the use of social networks for interpersonal relationships (whether with our relatives on Facebook, with our lovers on Tinder or Grinder or with the whole world on WhatsApp) or the model that is imposed of closed blocks, where you live with your back to public spaces and social diversity. Even minor prison sentences can be served at home, with a electronic bracelet.
Let’s add to this the ease that the different means of access to information and leisure (from the smartphone to the smart television) give us. Surely I leave things out of this inkwell that remains small year after year.
As a result, the historians we no longer go to the archives; workers have stopped having their own table in some offices, when they don’t put on the world by office; no one goes to the neighborhood business anymore, nor flirts in bars, nor reads the press in the library, and sharing time with family and friends remotely ceased to be a substitute long ago and became the norm. Even the player no longer needs to go to the casino, nor the scammer personally cajole to the cousin We bet on the amount within reach of a click versus the quality of face to face.
No more examples are needed, we have them permanently around us, in our own homes, we experience them daily and perhaps we are not aware of the magnitude of the phenomenon, with a cumulative effect of all these trends almost impossible to exaggerate and repercussions on our lives simply terrifying.
It is therefore imperative to stop and meditate on it and urgently open a public debate. But we will also have to take action: there are some viable proposals in this regard. If we citizens do not do something, those who will decide will be the innovations (technological or not) and the companies that promote them, obtaining from them benefits that in the past were described as fat. All this it does not go less On the contrary.
The effects of not leaving home
What are those effects? The most obvious have to do with the retreat of traditional public spaces (squares, work and study centers, shops, restaurants, cinemas, libraries and many more). Urbanism prioritizes private spaces: the home and the car in front of the street, the square, the sports center and public transport. The economy is also domesticated: on the side of the supply of goods and services that are planted at our door, which accentuates the strategic role of logistics and distribution.
On the demand side, we manage purchases in virtual stores or supermarkets and pay remotely with plastic or plastic money. bits. He jobto whom we dedicate so many hours of our lives, also tends to stay at home, without productivity seems to sufferalthough it would not be strange if the rebound in psychological conditions live with him decrease in accidents at work (and syndication).
How learning suffers
There are consequences for education, too: video lectures replace lectures, virtual labs steer future chemists away from test tubes and Bunsen burners, the automatic and telematic evaluation threatens to send the proctored, fixed-date exam to the dustbin of history.
All this, with much more comfort. But doesn’t learning suffer? Sociability is sure to: how many of our friends found their partner sharing a desk (or gambling in the cafeteria) in college? Loves in a network, do they inherit the evils of those of the flesh? with hardly any advantages?
The trend also brings with it net losses in quality of life (even with health consequences) and increasing social isolation that leads to phenomena such as loneliness among the elderly, deterioration in the quality of personal relationships, bankruptcy of solidarity that is born from shared experiences in the neighbourhood, in the factory, at school… Living locked up in the private space of the home has a cost, and it is not small.
Because it is not evenly distributed in society: in many ways, the largest share of the digital divide is paid by the poor. Not having access to decent housing means that the home in which we tend and tend to lock ourselves up will be more uncomfortable, colder and uglier. Totally lacking it is even worse: Not having a place where the packages arrive is annoying, but just a trifle. Not being able to pay for a good internet connection or a telephone with an optimal connection translates into social exclusion and a lack of access to basic services: banks that limit personal service hours or procedures that the administration only admits electronically.
As if that were not enough, this denial of access accentuates the poverty trap: those who suffer from it pay more for goods and services, must spend more time on daily tasks, and see their already poor situation drastically diminished. social capital.
Consequences for women
Neither in terms of gender. The home, a traditional female space in our societies, imposes tasks that continue to fall on women: care for children and the elderly, cleaning, cooking, order. If the load of these tasks grows (or even if it doesn’t) and your distribution continues to gravitate towards a certain gender it will be that gender who pays for it.
But although some blame all this on greedy companies and perfidious governments, citizens enjoy its many benefits, and we drive it day after day in a thousand small decisions: where we buy, how we access music, how we get information… Something that It also has no small effects on the quality of our democracies. But we still can (and must) do something about it.
Mauro HernandezAssociate Professor of Economic History, UNED – National University of Distance Education
This article was originally published on The Conversation. read the original.
